ManuService ontology: a product data model for service-oriented business interactions in a cloud manufacturing environment

The ever-increasing distributed, networked and crowd-sourced cloud environment imposes the need of a service-oriented product data model for explicit representation of service requests in global manufacturing-service networks. The work in this paper aims to develop such a description framework for products based on semantic web technologies to facilitate the make-to-individual production strategy in a cloud manufacturing environment. A brief discussion on the requirements of a product data model in cloud manufacturing and research on product data modelling is given in the first part. A systematic ontology development methodology is then proposed and elaborated. The ontology called ManuService has been developed, consisting of all necessary concepts for description of products in a service-oriented business environment. These concepts include product specifications, quality constraints, manufacturing processes, organisation information, cost expectations, logistics requirements, and etcetera. ManuService ontology provides a module-based, reconfigurable, privacy-enhanced and standardised approach to modelling customised manufacturing service requests. An industrial case is presented to demonstrate possible applications using ManuService ontology. Comprehensive discussions are given thereafter, including a pilot application of a software package for semantic-based product design and a semantic web-based module for intelligent knowledge-based decision-making based on ManuService. ManuService forms the basis for collaborative service-oriented business interactions, intelligent and secure service provision in cloud manufacturing environment.